Technically I don’t use and ad block, I just run DuckDuckGo’s privacy plugin. You can show me ads, but not track me, weirdly enough it’s 98% the same result. It facinating that ad tech cannot see the difference between ads and tracking.
Somehow, (probably because there is no competition - yet), Google has not applied this reasoning to YouTube ads. YouTube ads are often louder than regular videos (which they could fix on their end if they cared), they are sometimes insanely long (I recently got an "ad" which was a 40 minute "free music" thing), and depending on the video they can pop pop up at terrible moments. They still haven't figured out that YouTube is loaded with exercise videos - a content category which has exploded since 2020 and where YouTube enjoys a tremendous lead on the competition. Rudely interrupting one of those is bad and brews resentment. Instead of doing that, they could plaster the entire video with unobtrusive ads and people would both look at the ads and be happy with the service.
I found it pretty smart, because I can imagine myself succumbing to watching a full video that was inserted as an ad if it's interesting enough.
However, if I was at home, opened YouTube just to entertain myself and opened one of the algorithm suggested videos, then – in that situation – an interesting video from a channel that is unknown to me, inserted as an ad could hook me and could lead to me subscribing to said channel.
Instead of that suggestive ad being inserted into the video. Why not use auto-play or recommended videos section? Suggested videos in the menu work great, better even, in your case scenario for content discovery.
I don't watch YouTube with ads and I don't subscribe to YouTube Premium but I pretty much doubt in-video content suggestions disguised as ads will do a better job of predicting what I'll watch next over menu video recommendations.
I'm not happy about seeing MKBHD's video in that restaurant, I don't care at all. I also don't care about seeing that ad (or any ad for that matter).
The original comment I was replying to mentioned watching a 40 minute music video placed as a YouTube ad. I chimed in with my experience of seeing a long tech review video placed as an ad.
>I found it pretty smart, because I can imagine myself succumbing to watching a full video that was inserted as an ad if it's interesting enough.
I'm not praising the ad as a user. I'm explaining why it might be smart from the POV of the advertiser (in this case MKBHD), because it serves their goals.
My parents have a smart TV and the youtube app w/o the paid youtube premium makes it a really bad experience. On iOS devices, I have yet to find a free ad blocker that properly blocks youtube ads after they put in new measures to defeat content blocker based ad blockers.
I had a problem that I figured out the solution to and put up a video of it that made me a few dollars a month. Then YouTube moved the goalposts and demonetized it because I don’t (and frankly, won’t) have 1000 subscribers.
So that’s the end of my video posting on YouTube. I’ve discovered some “hack” repairs to other devices (common washing machine and MacBook speaker issues), but you won’t see my solutions on YouTube, just 99 videos saying to replace it or fumbling with software settings that aren’t the problem.
Most likely outcome will be me posting videos on some alternative video platform. Looking at rumble.com
(I wish Amazon got into hosting videos like this, being at the place to buy seems the best place if you fail to fix).
Without any html/css/<script> intervention on my website, Adsense has been able to enable additional ads that stick to the bottom of the screen and another that pops up before going to another page. It’s all opt-in, but through the Adsense portal.
It’s all automagic now, over and above the blocks I had inserted.
People in their late 20s and 30s who remember Youtube as a catch-all location for lo-fi homemmade videos with few ads may not feel that YT premium is worth it, particularly if they already use adblockers, and don't use it much on mobile (where adblocking isn't possible without modded APKs). This generation also remembers torrents and Limewire, before Spotify made everything super-convenient.
Those who are more familiar with 'modern Youtube' with multiple pre-roll ads, clickbait and and influencers everywhere may be more receptive to paying just to get rid of the constant ads.
What's a modded APK?
Firefox and other browsers like Vivaldi have awesome adblocking nowadays. There are alternative frontends like invidious.
Newpipe is an oss app, perfect on Android. Vanced is very popular too but I never tried it.
But with nextdns I don't need any of those. Only newpipe because, besides the ads, having to keep the display on to listen to music while running is just stupid.
NextDNS doesn't block ads on YouTube because they're served from the same domain as YouTube videos.
And you are right. Ads are blocked by newpipe, nextdns in this case is worthless.
Sorry for the misinformation everyone.
I run ad-blockers everywhere (and I know there are ways to block YT ads), but will still pay if you give me this reasonable option.
The forced bundling with YouTube Music is the only thing that keeps me from subscribing and keeping a trigger finger on the mute button (I use YouTube primarily on AppleTV). It's not even the price so much as it's the redundancy of subscribing to both Spotify and a lackluster Spotify competitor at the same time.
The moment Google offers YouTube Premium Lite (an unbundled version they've been trialing in European markets) in the US, I'll subscribe and never look back.
That’s not quite correct. YouTube pays out creators who monetize their channels using YouTube ads (separate from any sponsors in the video itself). The amount paid out varies but is around $3-5 per 1000 views.
With YouTube Premium, among other features you get to avoid seeing ads. But Google still pays out creators a share of the YouTube Premium fee. See https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6306276
So from my perspective paying for YouTube is more important than paying for Netflix, since with YouTube you help support smaller creators, while with Netflix money gets consolidated into big names and brands. The platform takes a cut at both, but it is still better to have some go to small creators instead of everything going into giant corporations.
you can listen to any video on mobile in the background, also no ads on mobile (so you don't need some hacky 3rd party app)
And you get YouTube music, which is comparable to Spotify (I prefer it in fact)
There's more content on YouTube then any other video platform, so in my opinion 15 per month is worth it
They can block people who are using adblocker from watching, as long as they don't do that I can't really see any moral grey area here.
It’s nice to know I’m directly supporting the channels I watch too, as I can’t feasibly sign up to dozens of Patreons.
It's actually amazing that Google has let Patreon eat its lunch on this front, the latter becoming the predominant platform for direct monetization while YouTube continues playing the chump's game of seeing how much advertising they can inflict on users before they revolt.
[edit] I'm well aware of YouTube Premium, but Google's insistence on bundling it exclusively with YouTube Music greatly limits its appeal. If they offered a standalone subscription (as they are piloting in some European markets), they could probably expand their subscriber base by a significant factor.
Put another way, if Netflix were only available as part of a bundle with a cable subscription, do you imagine they'd have more or fewer subscribers than they do right now?
People just ignore the ads instead.
The salient point is YouTube/Alphabet has completely missed the opportunity of facilitating Patreon-style commerce, despite being best positioned to do so.
But instead of enabling creators to receive money directly from audiences, an advertising juggernaut like Alphabet would probably rather keep their volunteer content creators incentivized to be shills desperate for advertising dollars.
I predict all the quality creators capable of garnering support via systems like Patreon will eventually abandon YouTube altogether, leaving YouTube to become even more of a raging dumpster fire of advertising upon advertising upon advertising masquerading as content from "influencers".
I've never even had a YouTube login, but the few channels I access fully via the web interface only ever spam me with YouTube Premium offers for eliminating ads.
There's zero offering/marketing of direct-to-creator subscriptions, not that I've seen.
There's also zero chance of my buying YouTube Premium, but a non-zero chance of my giving money exclusively to the specific creators I value - even if YouTube took something along the lines of a haircut for making just those channels ad-free.
Hopefully the difference is clear.
I often bypass to Wikipedia, because it shows me what something is, not only where I can buy it.
The moment a video is born, it lives until its sponsored time runs out.
If a content creator wants to leave something up and reap some internal ad-sales, or tip-generation scheme... they just have to sponsor the video with more time.
People who like it, can also sponsor it.
And sure, have some sort of "Library of Congress" feature to save videos deemed as significant...
But once the time is up... the video is gone. Exists only in memories.
Seems like a huge portion of videos are just taking up space... start pruning.
And a lot of videos... they don't matter. 40 different versions of the same old song, 20 different shots of the same sports blooper, 900 different versions of the same boring news cast. Like... none of these need to be on there taking up space / inflating the hosting bill.
At some point, no matter how cheap cold storage is, the "dead" content costs will trump the live content streaming. Like postpone but... at some point content needs to be pruned. What's the value in keeping everything forever? 1 year after the video was last viewed? 5? Like when can you safely purge videos?
Now if 15 years from now storage has stopped becoming cheaper, the rate of new content has stopped growing, the size of new content has stopped growing, and the old content is starting to become a significant fraction of the operating costs then sure. At the moment (and for the last 15 years) none of those things is happening though.
With a strong market dominance one can then focus on profits with minimum risk. One way to raise profits would be to impose taxes, like with streamers get donations through "youtube bits". They could go further and demand taxes when any company do things that has monetary value, like say when a company want to make a video about their products. They could do like Facebook and many dating sites and offer a service of "promoting" users above other users. One can couple access to the site to hardware products like mobile phones, or split off features to "exclusive" access users. One can down rate the speed/quality of freeloaders, pushing users to upgrade their accounts to premium accounts.
The ways to monetize a market dominant position is to many to count. The hard problem is the iron grip needed on keeping users on the platform.
This is kinda what's happening already. Most major websites stopped hosting their own and instead publish on YouTube and embed it
As such they're selling their users' tracking which I hate, but they love it for the extra income and exposure their videos get.
Hosting videos is not hard at all. But this is not the reason why nobody hosts their own anymore. YouTube's very dominance is what keeps it dominant.
Also, YouTube has a data trove of metrics that interest advertisers. Why not selling those? You have a commercial page that let’s say sells clothes and you want to upload a video to target women aged 18-25. Here’s the data to show you what you need to do, and we’ll charge you $15k to give you a detailed report. Brands would go bananas for metrics like these.
It was kind of like that when interest rates were near zero, affording endless deferral of income.
I'm waiting for the day when we can solve these ills of private property with technology.
The employees and servers are expending real energy keeping YouTube operational. Meaning, whether it's through ads, a more centralized body stepping in, or some other less pervasive, opt-in business model - the thing needs to cover its own costs. I don't think a lack of private property would solve much there.
The problem is using social services to generate capital. A public good for private interests is wrought with contradictions. And, as you can see, covering costs =/= generating capital.
Not even mentioning that the mode continuously works to undermine itself in making production more efficient by developing technology and driving down prices but profits as a whole too.
You're still thinking in the framework of capitalism.
Let me be clear that I think that doing anything but capitalism is bound to fail while we're living in a resource restricted reality.
Nonetheless, if we want to think about it for arguments sake: there are no costs associated without capitalism, only necessary work and resources. It's really hard to think without the restrictions of capitalism for me, because that's the only way I've ever experienced and it's so effective at prioritizing resources and productivity. Anything else has historically always fallen short.
Though it's still a pretty fucked up and heartless system
That's just redefining the term costs to not include work and resources. The term resources alone makes up nearly every operational cost possible: time, man power, CPU power, metals, environment, ...
Capitalism has nothing to with defining what something costs, it has everything to do with resource ownership and its distribution.
"Necessary work and resources" is exactly what is meant by costs. Scarcity is a property of the universe we live in. Capitalism doesn't prescribe or create scarcity, it just offers a framework for dealing with it. All other systems also have costs and operational expenses—they just aren't borne primarily by those making the decisions.
Edit: https://vancedapp.com/
Though it's just that I don't like the video format in general. If there was an ethical decentralised platform I probably wouldn't use it either.
However the way video has been centralised online is a big problem IMO. Imagine if every blog you read you could only get through Google.
For example, if you were making a transit app, a savvy iPhone 13 ProMax user with a top-tier data plan will see very different problems (or at least see different priorities) on their commute than your Uncle Sidney with his belt-holstered, used, Samsung Galaxy J2 running on Ting Mobile. They're both important, but in the tech world, you have to dig a lot deeper to get the Uncle Sidney perspective.
That's how showing ads on your site is abuse of the user.
You did not ask for your brain to be stimulated like this - what you did ask for is the content that comes after ad. That's the thing you consented to.
Ads abuse your desire to watch something that you want to watch, by cramming in something that you did not want, leeching your precious time and brain-processing energy, in order to sell you something that you did not want to have in the first place.
People are used to abuse. My internet is very different from the internet most people use. I feel sorry for them.